Automated Extraction of Information From Texts of Scientific Publications: Insights Into HIV Treatment Strategies

Text analysis can help to identify named entities (NEs) of small molecules, proteins, and genes. Such data are very important for the analysis of molecular mechanisms of disease progression and development of new strategies for the treatment of various diseases and pathological conditions. The texts of publications represent a primary source of information, which is especially important to collect the data of the highest quality due to the immediate obtaining information, in comparison with databases. In our study, we aimed at the development and testing of an approach to the named entity recognition in the abstracts of publications. More specifically, we have developed and tested an algorithm based on the conditional random fields, which provides recognition of NEs of (i) genes and proteins and (ii) chemicals. Careful selection of abstracts strictly related to the subject of interest leads to the possibility of extracting the NEs strongly associated with the subject. To test the applicability of our approach, we have applied it for the extraction of (i) potential HIV inhibitors and (ii) a set of proteins and genes potentially responsible for viremic control in HIV-positive patients. The computational experiments performed provide the estimations of evaluating the accuracy of recognition of chemical NEs and proteins (genes). The precision of the chemical NEs recognition is over 0.91; recall is 0.86, and the F1-score (harmonic mean of precision and recall) is 0.89; the precision of recognition of proteins and genes names is over 0.86; recall is 0.83; while F1-score is above 0.85. Evaluation of the algorithm on two case studies related to HIV treatment confirms our suggestion about the possibility of extracting the NEs strongly relevant to (i) HIV inhibitors and (ii) a group of patients i.e., the group of HIV-positive individuals with an ability to maintain an undetectable HIV-1 viral load overtime in the absence of antiretroviral therapy. Analysis of the results obtained provides insights into the function of proteins that can be responsible for viremic control. Our study demonstrated the applicability of the developed approach for the extraction of useful data on HIV treatment.